From cultural ambition to sensory reconstruction: a reading of new work from Zheng Lu Author：Hang Chunxiao

Through the title of the exhibition Constellations Shen and Shang Zheng Lu reveals his cultural ambition, hopung to connect in his work the twin cultural traditions of the present and the past in order to reconstruct in a macroscopic sense a narrative structure of the human. For Zheng Lu, the symbolic connotations of Shen, or Orion, and Shang, or Antares, in classical Chinese culture indubitably act as a certain theme, purpose, unitary direction of signification within this reconstruction. What, then, is the symbolic meaning of these two constellations in the traditional Chinese context? Shen is one of the seven constellations of the White Tiger in the West, while Shang, also known as Xinsu, is one of the seven constellations of the Green Dragon in the East. To put it simply, Shen and Shang are names for the stars given by the ancient Chinese: Shen appears in the West in the evening, while Shang appears in the East at dawn; they remain forever separated. Modern astronomical findings indicate that Shen and Shang are actually one and the same star—Venus, the planet that is closest to the earth in the solar system, which explains why they never appear at the same time. However, the sense of separation created by this natural phenomenon is not of concern to Zheng Lu. Instead, he is interested in the sentiments of life expressed by the traditional Chinese literati with regard to this natural phenomenon, as reflected in the ancient texts: “Living our lives without seeing each other, we are just like the stars Shen and Shang,” or “Able to see each other, we are not like Shen and Shang.” For the artist, this phenomenon reflects certain definitive but involuntary traits the literati: namely, the insurmountable gulf between reality and their spiritual ideals. The symbols of Shen and Shang shift from the natural to the human, becoming spiritual autobiography of the literati.

After grasping this symbol, closely related to the human, Zheng Lu implements a new narrative structure through his sculptural practice, utilizing the visual resources of the present to make a statement about the spiritual nature of the lineage of the past in order to complete a non-political meta-narrative at a personal angle. The work “Mayfly” takes form as the artist randomly splashes trails of ink on the wall, then placing pairs of insect wings on each mark, a feature chosen for its imagery of fleeting existence and the sense of sorrow for that brief life. Where does this sorrow come from? It is located at the position of the literati, just at the rupture between the ideal and the real— in this case, sorrow is a necessity. In this piece, however, this feature is not the key. The crucial component, in fact, lies in the metal characters that compose the wings of the mayflies, which are based on the content of a poem, entitled “I Want to Fly,” that the artist wrote in his youth. The artist clearly wishes to merge himself with history and the traditional sorrow of humanism in order to complete a narrative structure that simultaneously harbors past and present. This experiment is interesting for the artist because the transformation of youthful sentiment into weighty historical material causes his own affect to become an inevitably aesthetic experience. For Zheng Lu, this affect belongs not only to him: it is open and faces others. He strives to move away from that sense of individuality, cloaking his poetry within the sensory representation of his work and hiding it within the subtle details of the insect wings. The work thus achieves an angle beyond the purely personal, juxtaposing delicate metal sculpture with arbitrary traces of ink and borrowing the form of multimedia work common to contemporary art. He creates a visual contrast between gaudiness and emptiness as the visual sensation of the image of mayflies mingles with the sigh of the literati, whose fate is that of Shen and Shang, constructing the attributes of the human.

Throughout the reading described here, I am continually astonished as a viewer by the obduracy of this work, by his insistence on induction and conclusion of the historical scenes alongside the fateful logic of this derivation of the aesthetic experience even as meta-narrative is brought under question. The key to this insistence lies only with Zheng Lu, kept secret in many ways. Viewers can only grope at the fragmented messages of the work. In “To Father,” which dates back to 2007, we vaguely sense that this stubborn quality may emerge from his family background. That piece transforms the text of a poem written by the artist's father, “I Want to Go to Beijing,” into the likeness of the Mao badge so ubiquitous in that era. As an historical product of political worship, the tone of the badge itself fits the content of the poem, which describes a pilgrimage to meet Mao Zedong. Anyone even slightly nostalgic about that era knows that the combination of the two elements raises a certain sentiment, a sorrow that springs from the uncertainty of history and a sense of rootlessness tied to individual destiny. Zheng Lu turns this sorrow of history towards his father by way of tribute, seemingly demonstrating the possibility that his own obduracy may be that of his father, or at least the memory of his family. Even the title of the exhibition, with its reference to Shen and Shang, points back to the father of the artist, who wrote in his poetry the line, “The eternal sorrow of the literati is nothing more than the fate of talent, like Shen and Shang.” But such narratives emotions actually do not actually matter for Zheng Lu. The crucial point is that his works demonstrate the narrative conceit of such adamant form.

The sculptural installation “Hero” duplicates the image of the Hero brand of bottled ink that was once popular in the 1950s and 1960s. The word “hero” is carved on the surface of the work, on top of which ink is circulated via an electric device inside the base of the work, which then collects and recirculates the overflowing ink. Understanding this piece demands some background knowledge: this particular brand of ink was once widely utilized by Chinese intellectuals during a certain period of time, to a certain extent functioning as a symbol of knowledge and culture for that era. Zheng Lu draws such a symbol into his work because he considers the modern intellectual along with the traditional spirit of Chinese literati: though the two groups are from different backgrounds in terms of knowledge, they have shared the same fate at the hands of the Chinese reality. Modern Chinese intellectuals do, to some extent, resemble the ancient literati, unable to escape the huge chasm between the worlds of the spiritual and the real and sharing a mutual sympathy for the fates of Shen and Shang. Provided with the uniqueness of modern Chinese history, this presentation of sentiment appears as an even more radical collision. Hero brand ink here constitutes a visual symbol of the destiny of the Chinese intellectual in the form of a paradox: it is a practical tool for the recording and dissemination of knowledge that nevertheless becomes a useless prop through repetitive mechanical circulation. This parallels the tragic fate of the classical literati: “With nowhere to sell the pearls of my brush, I can but cast them amongst the nettles.” Zheng Lu therefore accomplishes a certain measure of cultural ambition by placing the sentiment of the literati at a logical position within the course of history, transforming it into a universal symbol of sorrow.

The results of this accomplishment, however, are not important; the key is the process. In terms of narrative art, how do the visual attributes of this work function? Art certainly requires the ability to provide the resources of contemplation, but blind emphasis of this function leads to nothing but a crisis in which art loses the sensory value of its visual existence. If the core function of art were its provisions for thinking, why approach the form of art instead of philosophy or social science? Art has obviously not yet been abandoned; we still need art, but why? Because art possesses a formal medium, visual sensation, that differentiates it from other territories of knowledge. Zheng Lu's early work “Drunk Under the Blossoms” interests me in this sense. Created in 2005, this piece breaks the original two-dimensional textural form of “Drunk Under the Blossoms,” a poem or, specifically, regular verse in seven characters, by Li Shangyin, through the unique form of metallic text that constitutes a combinatorial sculpture of rectilinear characters. Unlike his other works of the same period, “Drunk Under the Blossoms” cannot be characterized by simple and straightforward diagrammatic structures, instead centering itself on visual experience by changing the visual properties of the material of the work before reconstructing them to in more contemporary forms. Zheng Lu accidentally touches upon the topic of pure vision, also shifting the context of the borrowed classical poetry. In the original verse of Li Shangyin, the resplendent ease of the line “Enjoying the scene, unknowingly drunk on the flowing sky” and the carefree sentiment of the line “Holding a red candle to view the fading flowers”are transformed into a white cube of the visual shock of the modern. This visual reconstruction becomes a new passage to the classical world that relates to our perceptual habits of reading ancient poetry, also allowing us to avoid a certain type of inertia of judgment in order to rediscover the independence of the object of perception—an object of pure being that houses inspirations and experiences external to any existing empirical structure. As one of the artists earlier works, “Drunk Under the Blossoms” demonstrates through sensory reconstruction a latent logic of the restoration of art to visual existence, providing visual objects for consideration through a process of perceptual construction that exceeds simplistic and presupposed themes. This form possesses open epistemological value, able to transform our cognitive habits and create new experiences, judgments, and even thoughts through the mechanics vision. As a visual experience, art possesses unique qualities—particularly the cognition of viewing—absent in other cognitive media.

This sense of visual purity reappears again in new work from Zheng Lu. Both “Mayflies” and “Hero” aim at visual simplicity and self-sufficiency. Although there are indeed hidden themes within these works, they are neither simple nor straightforward—especially “Emptiness,” which resembles “Drunk Under the Blossoms” in its visual reconstruction of text. This project opens a new route to the spiritual experience of Inoue Yuichi, a subversive figure of Japanese calligraphy who remade the visual form of calligraphy by “breaking the walls of everything” and later became a major figure of abstract expressionism, through pure visual reconstruction. The life of the calligrapher was filled with passion, obsession, and legend, exactly the phenomena Zheng Lu utilizes as the basis of his own work. In “Emptiness,” however, the artist does not present a graphic simplification of the work of Inoue Yuichi, but rather carries out a spatial transformation of the character kong (“emptiness” in Chinese) as written by the calligrapher, constructing a sculpture constituted by numerous instances of the character. This piece accomplishes a sensory reconstruction, skipping redundant interpretations on order to focus solely on the destruction and reconstruction of material in order to form a kind of visual experience able to accommodate feelings of both being and nothingness. Just as Inoue Yuichi deconstructed traditional calligraphy and reconstructed it in two dimensions way, Zheng Lu turns his understanding of Inoue Yuichi into a new spatial visual existence that allows us to rediscover pure vision detached from legend, and provides us with new possibilities to approach the world of the calligrapher. Vision here again proclaims its independence, becoming a method of perceiving the world instead of a medium of perceptual outcome.

That art might function as a method of perception or even a pure visual structure instead of a medium per se is a simple concept to grasp but difficult to truly understand; we are handicapped by our habitual search for meaning in the process of vision, often neglecting notions of vision as an independently existing entity. This context of reading, formed by certain types of established understandings of meaning in the visual form, often obstructs the determination to view. Art, however, can eliminate and then reconstruct these modes of perception through a unique visual form, allowing us to break away from existing experience in order to create new ways of thinking. The crucial factor for the accomplishment of this process is the sensory reconstruction of the artist himself. In both “Drunk Under the Blossoms” and more recent works, the artist's understanding of this notion gradually becomes self-conscious in way that results in a field of visual purity that only gradually appears in his work. Cultural ambition, for Zheng Lu, is constructed so as not to succumb to the diagrammatic trap; it is sensory reconstruction through vision that guarantees his work an open space for structural interpretation.